Essad Bey

(1905 - 1942)

Born Lev Nussimbaum to a Jewish oil magnate and a communist revolutionary, likely in Kyiv, Essad Bey grew up in Baku and fled with his father after the Bolshevik revolution to Berlin, where he converted to Islam. He determined to study “everything that had to do with camels, deserts, Arabs, dilapidated archways, and the people who had once erected them.” His autobiography, Blood and Oil in the Orient, was lambasted in an open letter signed by over a dozen representatives of Muslim countries as a “pornographic book” that would “discredit the Orient in the eyes of Europeans.”